In this video, we explore CERN’s most mind-bending experiment yet—an artificial recreation of the Big Bang using the world’s largest particle collider. Deep beneath the Earth’s surface, the Large Hadron Collider accelerates heavy lead ions to near light-speed and smashes them together, generating a quark–gluon plasma: the same exotic state of matter that existed just microseconds after the universe was born. This plasma is hotter than the core of any star and denser than anything we’ve ever crea